UNIT
8 LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODS IN
CLASSROOM SETTINGS
STRUCTURE
8.0 Introduction
8.1 Learning Objectives
8.2 Significance of making lesson plans
8.3 What is a lesson plan?
8.4 Components of a lesson plan
8.4.1 What
to teach
8.4.2 Whom
to teach
8.4.3 Assessment
mechanisms
8.4.4 Tools
of lesson plan
8.5 Planning a cluster of lessons
8.6 Model lesson plans
8.6.1 Tulika’s
classroom
8.6.2 Satpura
ke ghane jungal
8.6.3 Teaching
alphabet
8.6.4 Radha’s
classroom
8.6.5 Story
telling techniques
8.7 Posters and advertisements
8.8 How to make lesson plans?
8.9 Let Us Sum Up
8.10 Suggested Readings and References
8.11 Unit-End Exercises
8.0
INTRODUCTION
There
are many ways how we can teach language to children. Some of the techniques
that have already been discussed include – teaching through various activities,
summarising the lesson after explaining it, getting children to formulate
answers of various types of questions, problem solving techniques, making them
undertake surveys and the like. Each technique belongs to a specific language
teaching method that has a specific set of principles. Some teachers teach in
their ways that do not belong to any specific language teaching method. For example,
we have realised that some teachers dictate answers of the questions given at
the end of lesson to students and tell them to memorise those answers with the
expectation that this will help students to do well in class tests and board
examination. In some classes, teaching learning process becomes very
prescriptive in nature in which teachers teach the students in certain ways and
expect the students to follow their ways, whereas in some other classes, a
variety of innovative techniques are used to make the teaching learning process
a memorable one with the expectation that the learning will be lasting and add
experiential value to the knowledge base of the students. We have also realised
that children learn a lot outside of the tutored set up. They learn a lot from
the social environment as well as family environment.
Now
the issue is, if students learn language anyway on their own, in rather
unplanned ways and learn it well, then why should we spend so much time on
teaching language teaching methods to teachers? It is very important to make it
clear to you that learning language in a tutored set up and learning a language
from environment in untutored ways are two different learning situations and
the results of these two ways of learning a language are also distinct.
School
is a system of formal tutoring in which students of changing backgrounds and
skill sets sit together to learn a specifically designed graded course book for
them in a specific time frame. We live in a democratic society where the right
and effective upbringing of children of varying background in a systematic way
is the central aim. What should be the methods of effective teaching is as
important as knowing what children must learn at a specific time during a
specific stage of his learning process and how best he can learn what he must
learn. There must be effective assessment techniques to measure the learning
too. Schooling helps in systematic learning and development of appropriate self
assessment and analytical skills. Therefore, it is imperative that we must
develop the most effective methods and plan the classroom activities that would
be most appropriate for the effective teaching learning process of a given
curriculum.
While
developing the most appropriate plan for a given classroom, we must keep in
mind that children already know a lot of things before they come to classroom
set up at a certain stage for tutored learning. Therefore, the planning process
must try to relate the context of day to day living of the children and their
environment to the lesson plan so that the learning can be most effective.
In
this unit we will analyse some examples of different teaching styles and
attempt to develop a model of our own.
8.1
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
This
unit will help you to learn about the following:
• What
were the traditional ways of teaching language and what are their limitations?
• Importance
of making lesson plans
• What
is a lesson plan? Why do we talk about
lesson plan and not just teaching plan?
• Implementation
and assessment of effective lesson plans
• Scope
and possible flexibility permissible in a lesson plan
• Preparation
of effective lesson plan
8.2
SIGNIFICANCE OF MAKING LESSON PLANS
We
need to understand why is there a need to learn how to make lesson plan, given
that children learn language even though you don’t spend much time in teaching
them the language. Why should there be a language class at all in the
curriculum, given that children have got a natural tendency to learn their
mother tongue or the dominant language on their own? What is the need for
planning? We all know that some teachers go to class unprepared and they often
do a good job based on students’ needs, but those are people who have a strong
hold on the subject matter and a clear idea about types of students found in a
class and empathy towards them in matters of language learning. Those kinds of
teachers make a mental note of session plans and they present their lectures
based on students’ needs.
Schooling
carries certain features that are different from natural acquisition of
knowledge. It is important to know that class room teaching is a structured
process of imparting skills and knowledge of language to students and it is
distinctly different from unsystematic language acquisition. Even the way a mother
would teach her child a particular language at home is clearly different from
the way she would teach her child the same language at school. Language is a
very complex phenomenon and the degree of formality, type of sentence
construction and selection of words differ from context to context. Language
teaching at the level of school thus involves serious planning on the part of
teachers.
At
home, the learning process is largely experiential and there is room for making
mistakes and correcting oneself without being laughed at. That kind of
flexibility and time, a child does not get at school since the single most
important objective at school is ‘accuracy and perfection’ . An essential
feature of human language is variability both at the individual and social
levels and if a child has to really acquire proficiency in a language, then she
must also acquire a comparable level of context and listener sensitive
variability. It is here that the role of planning lesson becomes important. The
individual, social, cultural and linguistic variability obtaining in the
classroom makes the whole task of planning lessons more challenging.
Check
Your Progress-1
1.
Opportunities provided at home for learning a language are ————— ———— as
compared to opportunities provided at school.
a. less b.
more c. the same
d. not enough
2.
The child constructs his/her own knowledge base from the environment. Could you
illustrate this statement with examples that you may have noticed from
children?
3.
Why is planning so important for class room teaching in a language course?
8.3
WHAT IS A LESSON PLAN?
Let
us start with a class room situation to understand what a lesson plan is.
This
case is about a teacher called Mahima who got appointed to teach class 5
students in a rural school of Rajasthan called Kotda. The class had 25
students. She made a plan to teach lesson 16 called “Japan” from an NCERT book.
The chapter was about the culture and festivals of Japan. She began her class
by reading the chapter aloud. Although children were moving their fingers on
the chapter as per her direction, they did not really follow her reading line
by line. She stopped after reading two paragraphs aloud and started telling
children about Japan. Children looked at her with serious faces, which were
actually blank faces. Without caring about that, she continued with the same
method. Having given a little introduction about Japan, she continued reading
the rest of the paragraphs in the chapter aloud. There was no activity in the
class; all the children were sitting. Many started making pictures of different
kinds. Some children were making the picture of the flower pot given as the
chapter indicator, whereas others were making pictures of toys etc.
After
teaching the entire class that way, she stood up and went to the black board to
write down the difficult words and meanings of those words. Students started
copying those words. Before leaving the class, Mahima declared the unit test of
that chapter the day after the next day and the test would be about the
difficult words and their meanings as she wrote on the board. She clearly
directed students to learn those words along with the meanings if they wanted
to succeed in the test.
Check
Your Progress-2
1.
If you were to assess Mahima’s method of teaching based on the following
features, out of a score of 10, how much would you give her on each feature ?
•
Class participation
•
Child centred teaching
•
Relating text to context
•
Teaching preparation
•
Understanding of the subject
•
Scope given to children for self
learning
8.4
COMPONENTS OF LESSON PLAN
Let
us take a look at the list that Raghu made to make his lesson plan effective.
1. What
to teach
2. How
to prepare himself to teach the text
3. How
to teach the text
4. What
kind of teaching aids does he require
5. How
to measure whether students have learnt or not
6. If
the plan did not show any sign of success at the assessment level then what
alternative ways could be possible
This
is a rough sketch of how to go about starting with a lesson plan. Is there
anything that you can add to this so that we can make the rough planning
sharper? Add what you can as we proceed with the points in some details.
8.4.1 WHAT TO TEACH
Keeping
the level and learning expectation of a certain age group in mind, the text
book writers prepare the text books. The content of the book is not in our
hands, but how to cover and what to cover is very much decided by us. We must
also know the level of competence of the students so that we can make suitable
decisions about what to teach and how to teach. In lower classes, teachers are
given the responsibility to select a specific book as the text book for the
appropriate class, among a choice of a dozen very well competing books. As a
teacher, we must know our students and their competence levels well enough to
be able to decide the best book for them as well as to decide what to cover
from that book. If a book has 20 chapters does not mean we will have to teach
all the 20 chapters. We may do less or even assign additional readings to
children. Suppose we have decided that we will cover 12 chapters out of the 20
given in the text book, we must know the basis on which we have made the
decision. Unless we plan effectively from the very beginning, we will not be
able to know which 12 out of the 20 given chapters are the ones that we need to
ensure continuous growth of the students. We must also know the exact expected
outcomes of the course. At the end, what to teach is all about whether your
choice of text leads to attainment of the expected outcome or not.
8.4.2 WHO TO TEACH
We
can make effective lesson plans when we understand our children very well, by
their character and standards. It is important to figure out what does the
child know already by the time she enters your class and what does she need to
learn. If you teach his/her something that (s)he already knows or something
that is only remotely associated with his/her wildest imagination, the chances
are high that the child will remain blank and classes will get over one after
the other till the course gets over, without much learning taking place. We
have to have conceptual clarity of the chapters we select keeping the best
interest and learning / teaching objectives in mind. If we would select
something without knowing who we are teaching, the selection of the text book,
time spent in covering the text book and the time spent in doing various
activities will go waste. Secondly, we should also try to figure out what the
child already knows about the chapter to be taught. For example, if the chapter
is on Diwali celebration , we must first learn what the child knows about
Diwali and then we should focus on how to teach him the complexities of
language usage through teaching him/her a chapter on Diwali. We must also know
whether the language the child is being exposed to in the class room is his
first language or second language or third language. For example, if an Oriya
speaking child who speaks Oriya at home and in his environment opts for Hindi
as his first language at school where more than 90 % of the students are Hindi
speakers, the teacher must try to figure out whether he is the only one who has
opted for a language to be his first language which is actually his second or
third language or there is a group of students like him who need special attention
during the class. We need to keep in mind how best can we incorporate such a
learner in our lesson plan whose learning will be as good as all the other
learners. As already pointed out, children must be allowed to use their home
languages in the early stages.
8.4.3 LEARNING ASSESSMENT
We
need to be attentive about continuous assessment of children so that we can
ensure the learning status of children in terms of class participation and
response and their curiosity about specific lessons and outcomes. If we do not
feel positively about the way the class is going on with its effectiveness,
then it’s time to stop and adjust the plan so as to make it more interesting
such that class participation and students engagement with the class will
demonstrate constantly positive value addition of the teaching / learning
process. This requires constant assessment. At times, the teacher may feel that
she could actually engage the children in certain learning activity, whereas in
reality that may not have happened. This happens when you did not plan the
activity well in advance. We need to progress with our plan not by completing
each lesson plan by the way we had planned the lessons but by the way of how
exactly have students progressed with the plans made for them. This can only be
possible through continuous evaluation. Therefore, we must ensure that there is
enough flexibility in the plan we have made and that it can be constantly
adjusted by continuous assessment.
8.4.4 HOW TO TEACH
In
order to be able to plan, it is imperative to figure out what should be the
exact way of the teaching learning process in a given class room with a given
batch of students. For example, we have to decide whether we would divide the
class into small groups of 5 or 10 or go by the worksheet way. So there may be
a class that did not go according to the plan because the classroom activities
for better learning took a longer time than expected or the teacher took longer
time in explaining the concepts required to be taught through the lesson. In
that case, the teacher has to adjust the next allotted class for the completion
of the same chapter or another chapter in way such that overall course
completion is not hampered.
There
can be many innovative ways to combine classroom activities with concept
teaching. The primary requirement for this to happen is that the teacher should
herself have conceptual clarity about the issues being transacted and should
plan in advance the kind of individual and group activities that would help in
clarifying that concept. Though rigorous, the planning must have inbuilt
flexibility for on the spot changes.
We
must keep all the teaching aids ready by the time we start teaching. Some of
the important teaching aids include - lesson plan, work sheets, charts, picture
cards and the workbook. The language materials are also very important because they
play a vital role in the preparation of the teaching aids. For example, the
word picture cards or even alphabet cards can at times play a very important
role if the class demands. The materials may also be preserved to be used for
multiple purposes with various modifications, additions and innovative
explorations. Probably the most important language asset is the text around
which the teacher plans to build all her teaching plan.
Check
Your Progress-3
1. The
learning path of the child is primarily guided by the:
a. Teacher b. Parents c. Child himself d. Curriculum developers
2. How
important is it for you to know the class size and varying standards of the
students present in your class?
3. What
does ‘flexibility in lesson plan’ lead to?
4. Why
must we use the language as per the level of the children especially in the
primary classroom?
8.5
HOW MUCH TO PLAN IN ADVANCE
Most
of the time, schools focus on ensuring that teachers makes elaborate lesson
plans and complete their annual diary perfectly with a hope that that is the
best way to administer academic progress and administration of the teaching
learning process. Though this may ensure that the teachers are working hard, it
does not ensure that learning is as effective as it could be or must be. In
such places, the weekly or daily progress reports made by the teachers are
given importance to and the teacher focuses on the given class(s) he teaches on
a given day, often forgetting that the entire work done by the teacher as well
as the students may prove useless if specific learning objectives are not
realised. Such a system does not give much importance to increase the core
competence of the children; it rather ensures the course is complete the way
text book designers and teachers had prescribed it for the children. It has
also been noticed that such a system does not leave any scope for children to
come up with innovative ways to make the teaching learning process effective
for them going by their interests or their ways. This is against the basic
premise of learning that the child learns the language in his/her own way.
How
early should a lesson be planned? There is no absolute answer to this question
as learning is an ongoing process with very fluid land marks. What a teacher
must ensure is synchronisation between the mental level of children, their
curiosity, their participation, her own intervention levels, challenging
activities and conceptual clarity. A plan devoid of these features lacks in
exploratory adequacy. The plan must ensure that there is enough room for the
child to ask whatever she wants to ask and find an answer to it. She must be
allowed to articulate her thoughts and clarify her confusions the way she wants
them to be clarified. Children must be allowed to create their own constructs
and conceptual frameworks to proceed with the lesson which does not have to be
totally different from the teacher’s plan, but a combination of both.
The
teacher must also be aware that individual attention to student participation
is as important as encouraging student participation. Instead of simply
striking out a wrong answer with red ink, the teacher must try to analyse why
has the child made the mistake she has made. This is called error analysis.
Errors are not pathologies to be eradicated. Errors must be analysed and plans
must be made to effectively remove them from the child’s knowledge base so that
the child would not commit that error ever again.
Check
Your Progress-4
1. Fill. Usually teachers emphasise on making ____________and
completing __________________.
2.
What important factors have been discussed
in this subunit about the student-centric lesson plan?
3.
If children would be allowed to play a key
role in the planning of a given text at a given point of time during teaching,
what difference would it make on the planning for effective learning?
4. How
do you plan to go about planning your lessons before you get started with the
subject to ensure exploratory adequacy?
8.6
MODEL LESSON PLANS
Let
us now look at few lesson plans and investigate and analyse the methods
involved in those plans. These plans are from different contexts and thus let
us see how does the teacher take help of these lessons for her/his use and what
does (s)he ignore. We will also see how well the teacher created basis for
class participation or ignored it and which aspect of teaching learning
objective (s)he has tried to achieve.
8.6.1
MODEL LESSON ONE- TULIKA’S CLASS
This
is the lesson plan of a class 2 teacher called Tulika. Let us look at her plan
and analyse the model.
Tulika
is a primary school teacher in a school at Kalyanpur in rural Bihar. That
school has village at one end and a jungle at the other end. Farming is the
major occupation of the people living there. Some parents work in the town as
masons, rickshaw pullers, carpenters, vendors etc and they visit home once a
week. Most of the children spend time in helping their mothers in the crop
field, taking care of other siblings and cooking etc. Most of the children have
illiterate parents and some have semi literate parents who have studied up to
primary school or at the most high school. Children of her class do not have
exposure to newspapers, magazines or books etc.
Tulika
teaches a batch of 30 in class two. Children speak Bhojpuri at home whereas the
medium of instruction for them is Hindi at school. The children can recognise
all the letters of Hindi alphabet is how they can read few words, but they can neither
read fluently the story books they have been given nor can they understand the
sentences properly. This example is taken from a text book that she teaches to
such a batch. The name of the story is “Saccha Mitra” which is the 10th chapter
of Bihar board class 2 textbook.
Tulika
realises that she has to teach the lesson by speaking to students in Bhojpuri
as well as in Hindi. She is also sensitive to the fact that children are likely
to use Bhojpuri when they answer to her questions and she doesn’t have to
forbid them from using their first language or shout at them for the same. She
believes that making small groups in the class can make children help one
another to understand the text better and learn better. She also understands
that she needs to give importance to reading, writing, speaking and listening
skills and make them happen in the class in a meaningful way so that the
children can understand the text, context and make progressive growth towards
learning the language.
The
story is about two friends who meet a bear while returning home. She decides to
start the class by discussing with children the kind of animals they know about
because she knows that the children would know about animals from the
environment.
She
had to complete that story in a week and everyday she teaches for 35 minutes.
She read the story twice or thrice before she went to class. Her teaching
objectives and lesson plan had the following points:
•
Engaging the class with drawing activities
•
Giving them opportunity to speak to each
other and to the teacher about the story
•
Giving them the opportunity to talk about
the pictures
•
Making them read the story by understanding
the story
•
Making children write down the names of the
animals
•
Letting children predict the end of the
story
•
Making them talk about the animals they see
in the surrounding
Her
day wise lesson plan looked like the following:
Day
one – Familiarising children with the names of the animals
around them in written form
Process 1. Asking
children to write down the names of the animals they see around them
2. Telling them to write down the names of
the animals they see around them, draw their favourite animals in the copy and
encircle the name of the animals they see on their copy
3. Make
them read out the names of the animals written on the board adopting the
language game
method
and make the sound the specific animal makes
Day
two – Developing prediction skills among children
Process 1. Leaving
the children with the story for sometime to observe the three stories given
there
2. Making
children give presentations on the story and showing signs of appreciations
3. Making
the children predict in the middle of the story
4. Writing
down all the predictions on the board
Day
three - Story completion process taking the predictions given
by the children
Process 1. Reading
out the entire story aloud and bring those words to board that children are
very familiar
with
like, gaaon, bhaalu,football, mitra, dadi, muh,naak, murda, raam, shaam etc
2. Making
children write down these words on their copies
3. Making children encircle the words
‘gaaon’ and ‘football’ on page one and repeat the same process in the last
paragraph on the third page with words such as ‘muh’, ‘kaan’, ‘naak’ etc
4. Playing
‘Bhediya aayaa’ language game with them
Day
four – Reading the beginning portion of the story with
difficult words and asking them to guess the meanings from context
Day
five – Working together on the word exercises given at the end
of the chapter with the children
Day
six - Working together with the children on the sentence level
exercises given at the end of the chapter.
Summary
and analysis of the day wise analysis plan
Day
one:
Tulika started teaching by asking children to talk about the animals they see
in their surrounding. Then she wrote down the names of those animals on the
board. Children saw the words written down on the board and wrote them down.
Children started with pet animals first and then went on to talking about wild
animals.
She
played a game with children after writing down all the words. In that game,
children were asked to make the sound of the animal at once whose name she
utters. Then she asked the names of the animals she wrote on the board. When
she realised that children recognise the names of the animals, she told them to
write them down on their copies. Then she asked children to draw the animals
that they like and encircle the matching names. Tulika started taking rounds in
the class as children got engaged with the activity given by her and she helped
children to finish the activity that got stuck in between.
Day
two: Tulika focused on the three pictures given in the story.
She asked students to narrate what they see in the pictures. Children said they
saw two boys who were standing in the jungle, a bear was there and a boy was
found on the tree. Then she asked children to narrate further about what they
saw in the picture, such as what the boys were doing, what the bear was doing
etc. Then she asked children to tell stories about the pictures they saw. The
children hesitated first, but later they told many stories that they could
possibly imagine about the pictures. Tulika appreciated all the stories and
encouraged the children.
Then
Tulika told the children that she would read out the story for the children.
Then she read the story aloud at a slow pace and loud voice. She told children
to recognise what she reads by moving their fingers on them. Almost half the
children were reading the story along with her in a soft voice. Those who still
could not read, listened to the story carefully. Tulika ensured that she made
the seating arrangements very well so that weak students could be helped. She
made those children who could not read sit with the ones who could read. She
stopped when the two friends met the bear. Then she asked, what might have
happened when two friends were found in the jungle alone and they had nothing
to fall back on.
Children
gave many possibilities. She wrote down all the predictions children gave on
the board along with the names of the children.
Day
three: Today Tulika read the story aloud again and again,
stopped where she had stopped before. She repeated the same process of making
the children predict the end of the story and continued reading thereafter.
Soon after completing the story, Tulika got into character analysis of the
story in an explanatory mode. She asked questions such as, how did children
like the behaviour of the friends; what happened to the friendship; if they
were in the position of the other friend, what might they have done and the
like.
Then
she wrote the word ‘bhaalu’ on the board and told students to encircle the word
‘bhaalu’ from the story. Then she asked students to tell her how many times has
the word ‘bhaalu’ occurred in the story. She repeated the same process with
other frequently used words such as ‘gaaon’, ‘murda’ etc.
After
the word recognition game, she started the ‘Bhedia aaya’ game with the
children. As per this game, all the children were to act like a dead body and
one child was supposed to act as bhediya, who comes to attack. Bhediya’s job
was to move around without touching the dead bodies. Children who had been
asked to act like dead bodies were supposed to lie down on the floor like
statues, with eyes shut and straight face. Any child who would open the eyes or
smile or deviate from the statute posture was called as out of the game by
Bhediya.
Children
took a while to understand the game. Once they understood the game, they started
playing the game with all seriousness. They would lie down on the floor one
after the other with the entire body shaking with suppressed giggles. Half the
children started sneaking by opening their eyes occasionally and smiling. In
the first round, the game got over very soon. After few rounds, children learnt
the game and it wasn’t that easy to call game over so easily.
Day
four: On the fourth day, Tulika takes difficult words as she
starts the class. She asks children to encircle difficult words found in the
story. She wrote down all the difficult words found out by children on the
board. She asked if anyone knew the meaning of any given word on the board and
encouraged children to make sentences using the words. She then explained the
meanings of difficult words to children and made them say sentences using the
difficult words.
Day
five: Tulika worked together with children in solving the
exercises given at the end of the chapter. In one of the exercises, children
were asked to make words taking letters from a given word. Before taking up
that exercise, Tulika first asked children to tell any two words. She wrote two
words such as ‘kursi’ and ‘kitab’ on the board. She picked up ‘si’ from the
first word and ‘ta’ from the second word. Then she asked students what that
makes when they combine those two letters. That was easy for children and from
there they picked up the way to go ahead with the exercise. She called two
three children to the board to do the exercise and the rest of the children
started doing the exercise on their copies. Few children completed the exercise
faster than others. Tulika went to them and advised them to go over to the next
exercise. Children began finding names of the animals that they already knew
about and so on. After certain time, Tulika discussed the given exercise in the
class. This was a tough task as the letters were not only to be picked, but
they also had to be arranged in various orders to make meaningful words. After
this exercise, she picked up the sixth exercise that expected children to
select the most appropriate word for a given sentence. She read the sentences
aloud and asked children to answer to the questions by selecting the most
suitable words. Then Tulika started writing incomplete sentences on the board
and encouraged children to complete those sentences. Most of the children did
the exercise orally whereas few wrote them down on copies. The class got over
as she was with the repeat process of the same exercise.
Day
six:
On the sixth day, Tulika started sentence level exercises. First she started
with the question answer type exercises. She encouraged children to answer the
questions asked in the exercise. Some answered and some did not. She discussed
the answers after eliciting the answers from the students. She wrote down the
best answer for each question on the board. The entire question answer exercise
was completed this way and children copied them down on their note books.
Tulika took rounds in the class to figure out whether the entire class was doing
it effectively or not. She helped children with copying down the answers
written on the board who found difficulty in copying them.
She
then moved onto exercise 4 which expects children to make sentences using a
given word. She too got this exercise done through discussion first. She helped
children to understand each and every word by taking multiple examples till
they understood the words. Some children found it difficult to make sentences
using words at the level of spelling. She wrote those words down on the board.
Almost all the children could make sentences using five words at least. The
class got over in the middle of this exercise. Three words were left to be made
sentences of which she gave as home assignment.
Check
Your Progress-5
1. What
was the size of Tulika’s class room?
a.
10 b. 20 c.30
d.40
2. Why
did Tulika ask children to draw the pictures of animals in stead of using
picture cards?
3. Why
didn’t she tell children names of few animals that she knew to check whether
children knew them or not?
4. Why
did she ask children to guess the end of the story in stead of discussing the
end in detail?
5. Why
did Tulika repeat the first half of the story on day three?
6. Had
you been Tulika, how would you have handled a situation in which a guardian or
a parent would have complained that you wasted time in stead of teaching the
language by doing various unnecessary activities in the class?
8.6.2
MODEL LESSON 2 - SATPURA’S GHANE JUNGLE
Let
us now see how Heena prepared a plan to teach a poem in the class.
Heena
teaches Hindi to class 5 children of Mangolpuri School which is situated in the
outskirts of Bhopal city. People of that locality live in small kaccha houses.
The locality does not even have a sewerage system or access to clean drinking
water, electricity or even a proper road. Street lamps are the only source of
lighting facility the children can have access to for their evening studies.
Most of the parents are illiterate and some have studied up to class 5. The
major occupation of the people living there is daily wage labour, auto rickshaw
driving, rag pickers and house maids. School going children help their parents
in rag picking too and they even help their moms in household activities.
Heena’s classroom has 25 children. The children spoke Hindi with lots of words
from Urdu, Gondi and Malvi. Many children were not able to read. The ones who
could read did so at a very slow pace with letter to letter recognition reading
style like “sat – pura – ke – gha- ne- jun- ga - la” type of reading.
Satpura
ke ghane jungal is a poem that talks about the dense forest of Madhya Pradesh.
Heena read it aloud two to three times. She used the map of Madhya Pradesh as a
teaching aid to show Satpura. She had planned to teach in four days. Her
objectives were the following:
•
Making children share their own experience
with jungal
•
Taking up group discussion mode as classroom
activity to encourage children to talk about the poem
•
Getting the children to learn the language
of the poem and poetic language style
•
Making children present and write about the
poem.
Her
day wise plan was:
Day
one
• Sharing
jungle experiences
• Introducing
Satpura to children in various ways
• Making
the children recite the poem with self confidence
• Developing
a shared understanding of the poem
• Telling
and knowing the names of animals in their language as well as in the prescribed
language of instruction which is Hindi in this case
Day
two
• Finding
the meaning of difficult words and placing them in a context
• Developing
a shared understanding of the poem through discussion
• Working
with compound words
Day
three
• Comprehension
of the poem through the discussion mode
• Bringing
experiences of the children to classroom situation
• Working
together with children in completing the exercises given at the end
Day
four
• Completing
given activities with the help of the children
• Helping
children in constructing their own answers
• Working
with rhyming words
Summary
and analysis of day wise lesson plan
Day
one: Heena started her class by asking children wehther all
of them have seen a jungle of not and the ones who had were told to talk about
it in the version of Hindi they speak. She wrote down the responses that talked
about description of a jungle, names of animals and birds found in a jungle etc
in standard Hindi, which was the medium of instruction for the given course.
She also encouraged children to tell the names of the animals they talked about
in standard Hindi to check whether they knew it or not. She then took use of
the teaching aid which was the map of Madhya Pradesh and asked children to
locate Satpura in it. She then went on to introduce the poem. On the day one
itself, she started with poem reading exercise with children by asking one of
them to read the entire poem. She then asked the next child to read two stanzas
of the poem. The class ended with understanding the poem with discussion mode
which also included imaginative discussion about what might be daily routine of
the wild animals in the forest.
Day
two:
Heena started day two with conceptual revision of the content of the poem after
reading out the entire poem. Then she asked children to read out three stanzas
of the poem and broke the stanzas into short questions for classroom
discussion. She discussed the meanings of difficult words in between in context
and made children make sentences out of them. She helped children with that
exercise when they get stuck.
Day
three: They continued with loud reading and understanding the
poem through discussion. She tried to ensure that the children read the poem
aloud and got into discussion mode to find out the meanings of the words and
the poem themselves. She helped them while she put them through the entire
process. She kept asking questions from the poem as she led the class to
discuss the poem. After the discussion, she asked two/three children to read
the entire poem. Then she drew two columns on the board with two headings. One
column got the heading ‘mujhe jungle accha lagta hai’ and the second column got
the heading ‘ mujhe jungle accha nahi lagta hai’. Then she asked children to
fill out the columns and discussed the points given by children as she wrote
down the responses from the children in the column. Then she asked students to
write a paragraph on the poem. She took rounds in the classroom and helped
children as children wrote down the answers.
Day
four: Heena starts the fourth day by revising all the points
she had covered on the third day. She then turned to the exercises given at the
end of the poem. She had already discussed the poem with great details in the
previous days so children started writing down the answers of the questions
with little discussion. She then picked up rhyming words and asked children to
find out similar words from the poem. To clarify this exercise better to some
students who found it difficult, she wrote down examples of the words on the
board. Heena appreciated children who answered. Some children gave some words
which were not correct, but she still encouraged them. She again asked children
to write a paragraph on what they would do if they were left alone in a jungle
for a day. Children started writing and Heena took rounds in the class helping
children who asked her questions.
Check
Your Progress-6
1. On which day of her lesson plan did
Heena decide to do the exercise with the help of children?
a. First day b. Second
day c. Third day d. Fourth day
2. What was the significance of showing a
map in a language class?
3. Would you rate Heena as a good teacher,
given the fact she never explained the meaning of the poem by herself in the
class? Illustrate your answer with arguments.
4. Which learning skill could be developed
in children if you tell them to answer questions such as ‘what would you do if
you would be left in a jungle alone’?
5. Is it right to make children write the
answers of the questions given at the end of the chapter by themselves? Explain
your stand.
8.6.3
ALPHABET TEACHING METHOD
Lokesh
teaches class one at Devnagar government school in Delhi. The school is in the
city but the children who go to that school are from very low economic class.
Most of the children have labour class parents. They do not even have houses of
their own. They live in a place till the construction work goes on there and
when the work gets over they shift to another place where they work. They often
jump from city to city in search of work and thus their children cannot stay in
a particular school for long. They stay in a school for 3-4 months or at the
most for one year. The absenteeism rate is very high among these children.
15
children had registered in Lokesh’s class. The class has another 5 children who
were brothers and sisters of the registered children but they are unregistered.
Thus the class has children ranging from one and half years to five/six years.
Although the toddlers were not a part of the class, but he nevertheless had to
take care of the entire class. The class does not have desks or benches. Some
children were sitting on the rugs and others brought mats from home to sit on
the class floor.
Lokesh
had to teach Hindi alphabet to the class. He first asked children to tell the
names of everything they see in the class. Those things were like fans, chairs,
copies etc. He had also made the children draw pictures and made them write the
names of the pictures beneath them. His lesson plan for the upcoming four days
was the following:
•
Teaching letters with context
•
Teaching alphabet through the story telling
method
•
Leaving enough space for children to discuss
their opinion
•
Increasing their vocabulary
His
day wise plan was the following:
Day
one – Introducing the letter ‘ra’ in a context
Day
two-
introducing the letter ‘ka’ along with context
Day
three- introducing ‘sa’ and ‘la’ with context; reading out a
poem and letter recognition from the poem in the encircling mode
Day
four- letter recognition from the same words, gradation of
the words based on new letters
Summary
and analysis of day wise plan
Day
one: Lokesh decides to introduce the letter ‘ra’ through
games. He asks the children to tell their names whose names have ‘ra’ in it.
Then he writes them down on the board and encircles ‘ra’ alphabet. Then he
decides to start an activity in which a magician takes out only ‘ra’ words from
a box. He draws a box on the board and presents an imaginative magicians who
amusingly takes out ‘ra’ words like, ‘rumaal’, ‘rickshaw’, ‘radio’, ‘kachra’,
etc from the box. This way, he introduced many words with ‘ra’ to the children
in a very amusing way and wrote them all down on the board. Then he asked
children to write any two words that has ‘ra’ in it.
Day
two: On day two, Lokesh decides to introduce the letters ‘ka’
and he adopts the same language game method as he did with ‘ra’ letters. He
drew up a box and asked children what the magician would take out of the box.
Children imagined many words in Hindi that have ‘ka’ and Lokesh wrote them all
down on the board. Then he drew another box for ‘ra’ and called students to the
board to fill out the box with ‘ra’ words. He was very patient with the children
through out the class.
Day
three: Lokesh repeated the same language game to teach letters
‘sa’ and ‘la’. Then he read out two poems from the text book only and asked
students to encircle those letters from the text. Children found it tough to
find all the four letters together to encircle. Then Lokesh changed the
assignment and asked them to encircle one alphabet at a time.
Day
four : Now children were getting to recognise four letters.
This was about time for revision class because children had learnt the letters.
So Lokesh wrote down all the words he had taken help of to teach the four
letters to children. And then he asked students to make four boxes and
distribute the words to their respective boxes that carry the name of a given
alphabet. Finally, he showed a word ‘salwar’ and asked children which box does
it belong to. Children could not decide the answer because they had covered
three letters all of which were present in this word. Then Lokesh got into
discussion mode and made sure that children came with the correct answer, that
it belongs to all the three boxes. This way, children learnt how to read and
write four letters.
Check Your Progress-7
1. What was the day four plan of Lokesh?
a.
Teaching letter ‘sa’ b. Teaching ‘pa’ c. Teaching ‘cha’ d. Revision
of the lesson
2. Do
you think Lokesh had adopted the correct approach to teach letters? If yes,
then why?
3. Why
did Lokesh spend so much time in discussing with children which box does the
word ‘salwar’ belong to? He could have told them the answer straight.
8.6.4
MODEL LESSON PLAN 4- CLASSROOM OF RADHA
Radha
is an upper primary teacher in Ataru block of Rajasthan. She teaches English.
The school has children from the village area as well as from the city area.
Most of the parents work in crop field, grocery store, small restaurants, shoe
shop etc. Children who come to school regularly are mostly from farming
background. The drop out rate in Radha’s class depends on the timing of the
year as children do help their parents in the crop fields when they are needed
there.
Radha
teaches 41 children of class 8. She prefers to do poems if she gets a chance.
We take up a lesson plan that she has designed to teach in the class in a time
when it had been raining for a couple of days.
The
general objectives of the lesson plan:
•
Active participation of the children in the
discussion of the poem
•
Enabling children to make a mental picture
of the poem
•
Developing their
linguistic skills through discussion mode
•
Developing self
confidence of the children in learning English poems
The
specific day wise objectives of her classes were the following-
Day
one
1.
Sharing the experience related to rain and
discussing them
2.
Reciting the poems and developing class room
activities
3.
Discussing the meaning of the poem through
discussion method
4.
Group activity based method to find out the
meanings of difficult words
Day
two
1.
Making a picture and discussing prepositions
given in the poem through the picture
2.
Discuss the background of the poem
Day
three:
Teaching them adjectives and ask them to
find out adjectives from the poem
Day
four:
Working on the exercises given at the end of
text
Summary
of the day wise activity
Day
one: Radha asked children to talk about their experience with
rain and carried out the discussion in the question answer mode. Then she
started a game activity. As per that activity, every child has to recall a word
that comes to his mind the moment he hears the word ‘rain’. A child was then
asked to read out the entire poem aloud. She asked to children read the poem
with activities. Children were getting to understand the poem as they went on
doing the activities related to the poem in the class.
Day
two: Radha asked the children to draw the picture of their
village. When she figured out that children are finding it difficult to draw
the picture of the entire village, she changed her objective and asked them to
draw a picture of their home to school route along with land marks, which was a
part of the poem. Then she told children to draw the picture of a big hut and a
tree and went on to the board to write prepositions such as, ‘under’, ‘in’,
‘out’ etc. She explained prepositions to children with the help of the hut and
the tree. Then she gave instructions to children in English. The instructions
were in short sentences like, ‘draw a doll under the tree’. She took a round in
the class as children got engaged in the activity.
It
was a little difficult to explain the meaning of ‘around’ and ‘behind’ to
children, but Radha took various other examples to explain these two
prepositions to them. This way the class got over.
Day
three: Radha made the children read out the poem and asked
them to explain certain things through the question answer mode. For example,
she wrote the word ‘garden’ on the board and asked children to give a
presentation on the word ‘garden’ using adjectives such as ‘green’, ‘huge’ and
‘big’ etc. Then she asked students to encircle adjectives given in the poem.
She told them to make few sentences that required them to use adjectives. This
is how children could conceptualise the broad picture.
Day
four: Radha gets to exercises. She read out the questions
aloud and when children could not understand the questions in English, she
explained them in Hindi and the local language and encouraged them to respond.
She wrote down the answers given by children on the board. She also wrote down
the answers given by children in the local language. Then she translated those
answers to English in the discussion mode. At the end, children copied down
from the board the final answers of the exercises given at the end of the
chapter.
Check
Your Progress-8
1.
Which subject did Radha teach?
a. Hindi b. English c. Science d. Maths
2.
Radha made the students copy down the
answers from the board on the last day. Did they learn any language from there?
3.
Make a lesson plan for class 3
supposing you are teaching the same poem there.
8.6.5
STORY TELLING TECHNIQUE FOR EFFECTIVE LESSON PLAN
Kaushal
teaches English to class 5 students in Faridabad of Haryana. He teaches a batch
of 25 who belong to lower middle class families. Most of the parents are daily
wage labours and some are road side fruit vendors. Children have to do
household chores and also look after their sibling.
Today
Kaushal is likely to teach ninth lesson of Haryana board text book. The lesson
is about the childhood of a boy called Narendra who becomes a big man at the
end. Kaushal had read the lesson before he went to class.
Day
one: Kaushal asked children to share the experience of their
childhood and told them to discuss the fun they had during childhood and what
kind of punishments they used to get. He narrated his own childhood story to
take out inhibition from the children who hesitated to talk about their
childhood due to shyness. That helped children to open up and share their
childhood experiences. Then Kaushal started reading the chapter aloud as in his
class most of the children were not able to read in English and those who could
read, they could only read two to three words at a stretch. He read out the
lessons with various activities and tones. At times, he used local language to
explain the matter more. Kaushal read out three paragraphs that were about
Narendra’s childhood. Then he asked children to comment on how Narendra was as
a child and then he returned to read the story. Children started speaking about
what they concluded about Narendra. After the discussion and explanation,
Kaushal made a list of the following questions on the board:
Name
:__________________
Age
:__________________
Mother’s
name :__________________
What
does your mother do :__________________ ?
Father’s
name :__________________
What
does your father do :__________________ ?
What
do you like :__________________ ?
What
do you not like :__________________?
Kaushal
asked students to find out everything about Narendra from the text as a first
exercise. Children found it tough to find out everything about Narendra and
write them systematically. Then Kaushal told children to speak to fellow
classmates and fill out the above mentioned questionnaire of the other one.
Boys and girls hesitated to speak to one another at the start, but later on
they spoke to one another.
Day
two: Kaushal started speaking about the activities of day
one. Then he read the entire story out again using local language. But he used
some difficult words as well. Then he split up the class into four groups and
told them to discuss in group about Narendra and write their points down. He gave
the children the freedom to speak to one another in their local language and
write down the points. There was noise in the class due to children talking to
one another. Therefore, Kaushal told them to learn how to talk softly while
taking rounds in the class.
Day
three: Children did the assignment through group activity.
Kaushal gave marks to each group and declared the performance rating of the
groups rank wise. He took out points from the discussion and wrote them down on
the board. The discussion continued on the pointers written down on the board
till the end of the class.
Day
four: Kaushal got the children to find out the answers of the
questions given at the end of the chapter while they were reading out the
chapter. As the children were finding the answers, Kaushal kept writing them
down on the board. This way, he finished the entire exercise through the
discussion mode.
Check
Your Progress-9
1. Which
language did Kaushal use on the second day as he read out the story?
a. Words
from local language b. English words c. Urdu words d. Hindi
words
2. Why
did Kaushal stop the children to write about Narendra and instead asked them to
write about each other?
3. Why
did Kaushal distribute the class into four groups?
4. How
does group activity help children to learn effectively?
5. There
was a lot of noise in kaushal’s class due to the discussion mode of teaching?
Do you think it is a good way to conduct the class? Don’t you think it affects
the gravity of classroom decorum? Argue out your answer.
8.7
POSTERS AND ADVERTISEMENTS
Posters
and advertisements are very important for an effective lesson plan. They
present things related to our life and environment in very simple and pleasant
ways. Till today, advertisements and even generic posters for that matter have
not been really been taken as formal teaching aids, but it is important to know
that although these are very small things, they are connected to teachers and
students in significant ways.
We
see various kinds of sign boards, posters and advertisements in various
schools, offices, shops, market places etc. We don’t have to work too hard to
understand these because they are made with the basic intentions to reach out
to people with lowest literacy standards. These things help to develop reading
skills. These are good ways to learn another language too for anyone, for that
matter.
There
are multiple ways how these can be used. You can tell children to take up a
poster, sign board, or any advertisement to make a nice project involving
drawing and writing. We can use posters for developing reading as well as
picture card explanation and presentation.
In
the lower primary classes, like in class 3, children can make a systematic list
of words taken out from pictures. You can show them a signboard and ask them
what is the meaning of the board and what does board try to say, say through
logos or pictures etc along with what is written in it. They can also tell what
they are implying basically. We can also tell children to write down those
messages in their own words.
Check
Your Progress-10
1. In
what way do posters and advertisements present to us things from our surrounding-
a. Difficult ways b. Unattractive ways c.
Simple and attractive ways d. Boring
ways
2.
Make a list of 20 posters and
signboards that you have seen in your locality.
3.
What kind of posters can we make for
class 5 lesson plans? Make a list of 5 questions that can be asked related to
this.
4.
What according to you is the importance
and benefits of using this in a language teaching class? Can posters and
advertisements be used in other ways?
5.
Make a lesson plan for class one or
two using some advertisements and make a different lesson plan for class 4
using the same advertisements as teaching aid.
8.8
HOW TO MAKE LESSON PLANS
A
class room has two important elements – teacher and students. Both are at the
receiving end of knowledge acquisition in the sense that both acquire and
enhance knowledge together and both are always in the process of learning.
Other elements that are important in a class room are – text books, lessons,
examination, experience the children get and the expectation of the parents
etc. It is important to keep these variables in mind when you prepare a lesson
plan. Lesson plans maintain both rigorous planning and flexibility. Firmness is
important to ensure that teaching objectives are met and flexibility is
important to ensure the real difficulties met while teaching.
Therefore
the teacher needs to keep a plan in mind that has firm objectives and leave
enough space for last minute adjustments. In order to stay focused the teacher
must write down the objectives that he must accomplish in the class and lead
the class with gradual incremental progress, although she may have to change
the classroom activities depending on the classroom situations. Let us see how
to prepare a lesson plan and how to divide up the lesson keeping the language
acquisition goal in mind.
1. Class
timings- The teacher must first know how many teaching days and teaching hours
he is getting in the week and in the year to complete the course. The length
and duration that you are getting per lesson will help you achieve your
teaching objectives very well. The teaching hours and teaching days of the
entire year will help you to design lesson plans for the entire course with an
aim to complete the course with its desirable objectives.
2. Class
size and age group of children
3. Title
of the chapter
4. Prior
knowledge- It’s important to check the prior knowledge of the children because
the issue of prior knowledge must relate to how you plan to proceed further
with the plan towards the completion of your teaching objectives and learning
objectives. If a teacher is teaching English to class three children, his basic
expectation from children would be that children must know the letters and
numbers in English. If there would be some children in the class who would not
know that, the teacher would have to make adjustments in his plan in such a way
that it can accommodate children with the lowest level of English language
proficiency in the class.
5. Common
objective/ General objective – This is the overall objective that you want to
achieve through the lesson.
6. Specific
objective- This objective relates to day wise plan as it aims to explain what
happens in a class in a particular day/period.
7. Methods/
Process- The method/process is about the line of progression in the class about
the chapter keeping the general as well as specific objectives in mind.
8. Self
evaluation- Just leaves this space vacant. The teacher must fill this out after
the class evaluation of his teaching. He has to write here what went right and
what went wrong in the class and whether the intended objective was achieved or
not. This should also help you to figure out why you had to make changes to the
lesson plan in the class.
9. Suggestion/
Remarks- This part helps you to make a note of your own experience in the class
and helps you to adjust the activity you have planned. This helps you to
investigate the viability of the rest of the plan based on the success of the
first day’s teaching activity.
Check
Your Progress-11
1. How
many things in general should you keep in mind when you are preparing a lesson
plan?
a. Four b.
Five c. Nine d. Twelve
2. What
is self-assessment?
3. What
is the difference between general or common or overall objective and specific
objective?
4. What
all must you include in the preparation of the lesson plan?
This
unit must have helped you learn how to make model lesson plans through various
models. You must have observed how Mahima should have designed her lesson plan
for class 5 on Japan in a school at Kotra. For example, we saw how Mahima
started her class by speaking to children about Japan and then went to talk
about their culture and festivals. She took help of a world map and showed
where does Japan figure in that world map and she also talked about Tokyo which
is the capital of Japan. She presented a lively picture of Japan before the
children by talking about their rituals, dressing sense, social style, food,
flower work etc. After this, there may have been discussion on the pictures
given in the chapter and meanings of difficult words could be discussed. The
effort may focus on children and the way they should understand the chapter
through group activity and individual achievement. You may also ask exercise
related questions after completing each paragraph. There is a section in lesson
10 in the project and portfolio that expects children to bring a whole lot of
materials on Japan together. She could have made an exhibition of the project
work of the children in the class room.
8.9
LET US SUM UP
•
If we plan our lessons well, we can teach in
a more systematic way.
•
It is very important for us to know the
background of children, classroom situation and background of the chapter theme
to be able to make a successful lesson plan.
•
At the primary level, children should be
allowed to speak without any hesitation and use the languages they know.
•
Children should participate actively in all
classroom activities. One way talk from the teacher may prove counter-productive.
•
It is not necessarily true that children
learn only that much what you plan to teach in a given class. Children have
their own thought process and they employ that for learning, which is why it is
important for you to engage them in thinking activities when you are preparing
your lesson plan.
•
Instead of finding out faults in every
answer given by children, the teacher must try to see what the children have
done with the given question when they have answered the question. It’s not important
to judge the learning through errors but through acquisition. The question a
teacher should ask is: What is it that a child has got right? Our focus
unfortunately is always on mistakes.
•
If the teacher can read the chapter two
three times before coming to the class, taking care of various activities and
adjustments that may be needed in the class would be easy.
•
Before making a lesson plan, the teacher
must know the class size, age group of the children, classroom situation,
student’s background knowledge about the topic etc.
ACTIVITY
Make
three lesson plans – one on teaching a poem, one on a story class and one on a
drama teaching class and try out the lesson plan with children. Record your
experiences.
8.10
SUGESSTED READINGS AND REFERENCES
Hindi
Bhag - 2, (2000) Patna: Bihar State Textbook Publishing Corporation Limited
English
Book – 5, (2004) Panchkula: Haryana Government, Text Book Press
8.11
UNIT-END EXERCISES
1.
Make a list of things that you have
understood from the model lesson plans presented before you in this unit.
Please discuss the answer based on the following points:
a. Teacher’s
role
b. Classroom
participation by children
c. Work
on the topic
d. The
ways of discussing the questions and answers
2.
What has been the crucial difference between
Mahima’s class and other classes?
3.
What are the primary things that you must
gather before teaching any class and why? What difference would it make in
planning a lesson?
4.
Had you been in Mahima’s place to teach the
chapter on Japan then how would you have taught the chapter? Make a lesson plan
to illustrate your answer.
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